King of the World
The Life of Louis XIV
Published on 11. July 2019
Book
Hardback
640 pages
978-1-84614-599-5 (ISBN)
Description
WINNER OF THE FRANCO-BRITISH SOCIETY BOOK PRIZE 2019
'The ultimate biography of the Sun King, Louis XIV' Simon Sebag Montefiore
A TELEGRAPH, SPECTATOR, BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE and TABLET BOOK OF THE YEAR
Louis XIV, King of France and Navarre, dominated his age. In the second half of the seventeenth century, he extended France's frontiers into the Netherlands and Germany, and established colonies in America, Africa and India. Louisiana, which once occupied a third of the territory of the present-day United States, is named after him.
Louis was also one of the greatest patrons of European history - Moliere, Racine, Lully, Le Brun, le Notre all worked for him. The stupendous palace he built at Versailles, and its satellites at Marly and Trianon, became the envy of monarchs all over Europe, frequently imitated but never surpassed. In all his palaces, Louis encouraged dancing, hunting, music and gambling. He loved conversation, especially with women: the power of women in Louis's life and reign is a particular theme of this book.
Louis was obsessed by the details of government, and travelled extensively around his kingdom, but often his choices for ministers and generals proved disastrous. After the death of his very able minister Colbert, the extraordinary cost of building palaces and waging continuous wars devastated French finances and helped set France on the path to revolution. In 1685, his decision to revoke toleration for Protestants damaged his country, and alienated Protestant Europe and at the end of his life, his forces were persistently defeated by the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy. Nevertheless, by his death, he had helped make his grandson king of Spain, where his descendants still reign, and France had taken essentially the shape it has today.
Philip Mansel's King of the World is much the most comprehensive and up-to-date biography of this hypnotic, flawed figure in English. It draws on all the latest research in France, Britain and America and pays special attention to the culture of the court, on which Mansel is an acknowledged expert. It is a convincing and compelling portrait of a man who, three hundred years after his death, still epitomises the idea of le grand monarque.
'The ultimate biography of the Sun King, Louis XIV' Simon Sebag Montefiore
A TELEGRAPH, SPECTATOR, BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE and TABLET BOOK OF THE YEAR
Louis XIV, King of France and Navarre, dominated his age. In the second half of the seventeenth century, he extended France's frontiers into the Netherlands and Germany, and established colonies in America, Africa and India. Louisiana, which once occupied a third of the territory of the present-day United States, is named after him.
Louis was also one of the greatest patrons of European history - Moliere, Racine, Lully, Le Brun, le Notre all worked for him. The stupendous palace he built at Versailles, and its satellites at Marly and Trianon, became the envy of monarchs all over Europe, frequently imitated but never surpassed. In all his palaces, Louis encouraged dancing, hunting, music and gambling. He loved conversation, especially with women: the power of women in Louis's life and reign is a particular theme of this book.
Louis was obsessed by the details of government, and travelled extensively around his kingdom, but often his choices for ministers and generals proved disastrous. After the death of his very able minister Colbert, the extraordinary cost of building palaces and waging continuous wars devastated French finances and helped set France on the path to revolution. In 1685, his decision to revoke toleration for Protestants damaged his country, and alienated Protestant Europe and at the end of his life, his forces were persistently defeated by the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy. Nevertheless, by his death, he had helped make his grandson king of Spain, where his descendants still reign, and France had taken essentially the shape it has today.
Philip Mansel's King of the World is much the most comprehensive and up-to-date biography of this hypnotic, flawed figure in English. It draws on all the latest research in France, Britain and America and pays special attention to the culture of the court, on which Mansel is an acknowledged expert. It is a convincing and compelling portrait of a man who, three hundred years after his death, still epitomises the idea of le grand monarque.
Reviews / Votes
the ultimate biography of the Sun King...a work of scholarly analysis and flamboyant anecdotage, international conflict and sexual politics -- Simon Sebag-Montefiore * BBC History Magazine * A superb biography of Louis XIV by Philip Mansel, the best non-French historian of France. Historical biography does not get better than this -- A. N. Wilson * The Week * The life of the Sun King, under whom France founded colonies in Africa, America and the East, is richly treated ... This nuanced study makes you feel for the old monster. -- Simon Heffer * Daily Telegraph Books of the Year * Mansel ... treads the line between the academic and the accessible effectively ... No other English-language biography has so successfully given us a portrait of him as man and monarch ... His grasp of the sources is superb -- Gareth Russell * The Times * A superb biography ... wonderfully detailed and fluent ... Huge amounts of information have been digested ... Mansel is alive to every nuance of rank and relation and a master of the mechanics of life at Versailles and the other royal palaces. This mastery naturally extends to dynastic relations and to the diplomatic history of Louis's reign ... The portrait of Louis that emerges from this titanic effort is compelling: a man of large appetites, capable of intense affection and loyalty, vengeful, gracious, vain, hard-working, hardened in the exercise of his own will, susceptible to flattery, conceited in his isolation, capricious, unforgiving and stubborn ... It seems hard to believe ... that this biography will ever, in English at least, be surpassed. -- Hamish Robinson * Oldie * Almost everything about Louis XIV - the size of his palaces, the length of his reign, the height of his heels - was on a gargantuan scale. ... Such splendour is there not just to dazzle, but also to deceive, and excavating the "real" Louis poses a major challenge for any biography. Philip Mansel's impressive new survey - the best single-volume account of the reign in any language - moves deftly between these fictive and objective worlds. He revels in the fetes and fireworks, the frescoes and tapestries, that glorified Louis's rule. But he is never blind to Louis' failings and absurdities, and clearly delineates how the "absolute monarch" was never as absolute as he wishes the world to think. ... Mansel brings this teeming, sybaritic, ultra-competitive Versailles vividly to life -- John Adamson * Sunday Times * Mansel is master of the well-chosen anecdote and of the pithy summary. Interesting details sit comfortable within the big picture that he portrays ... this is a scholarly, readable and impressively wide-ranging account of the longest reign in history. -- Julia Priest * Times Literary Supplement * Excellent though Mansel is on the larger picture - you will find no more comprehensive biography of this extraordinary monarch - his genius lies in unpacking the complexities of Louis' royal court. -- Miranda Seymour * Financial Times * Time and space both yield before Mansel's authorial ambition on quite as vast a scale as Louis's own territorial, reputational, amatory and gastronomic appetites. -- Minoo Dinshaw * Daily Telegraph * On a scale suitable to its subject, King of the World is in one way an extended moral fable ... Mansel tells the story of these wars fluently and fairly -- David Crane * Spectator * To do [Louis XIV] justice and encapsulate his person, his plans, his successes and his failures, all which involved a dizzying cast of characters and a mind-numbing web of relationships, is no easy task. With his extensive studies of court ritual and his sympathy for the Bourbons, Philip Mansel is the man for the job. ... Mansel's descriptions of how Versailles functioned are masterful and high-entertaining. -- Adam Zamoyski * Standpoint * Mansel has mastered a bewildering array of primary and secondary sources dealing with his man and his time period, and he's invested his entire narrative with a kind of tightly compressed narrative energy that has the most unlikely effect imaginable: it turns a 600-page biography of King Louis XIV into a genuine page-turner of a reading experience. ...a genuinely impressive work...one of the year's grandest biographies.. -- Steve Donoghue * Open Letters Review * thorough, scholarly and fluent... breath-taking... indispensable -- Donald Lee * The Art Newspaper * Philip Mansel's superb King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV will become a classic. Magisterial and definitive, this is the life's work of one of our leading historians. -- Jane Ridley * Spectator Books of the Year * a magnificent study of the life of Louis XIV. He shaped his own age and, partly because of some of his mistakes, helped to shape the future of France as well. -- Chris Patten * The Tablet Books of the Year * A wonderfully meticulous look at Louis XIV (1638-1715) from a leading historian of France. . . . An impressive, comprehensive biography of the Sun King-a must-add to any Francophile's library. * Kirkus * Philip Mansel's King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV is just a masterwork and a superlative delight, written with sensitivity and worldliness, political acuity and personal empathy all in Mansel's usual elegant prose. -- Simon Sebag Montefiore * Aspects of History Books of the Year * Mansel is a welcome prize for any reviewer. You will have a judicious guide, able to make well-founded assessments based not only on an understanding of the archives and printed sources, their riches and ambiguities, but also of the culture from which their assumptions stem. -- Jeremy Black * The Critic *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Penguin Books Ltd
Illustrations
24pp colour
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 162 mm
Thickness: 43 mm
Weight
1139 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-84614-599-5 (9781846145995)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
07/2019
1st Edition
Penguin Books Ltd
€12.99
Available for download
Person
Philip Mansel is one of Britain's leading historians of France and the Middle East. His previous books include Louis XVIII, The Eagle in Splendour: Napoleon and his Court, The Court of France: 1789-1830, Paris Between Empires, 1814-1852 and Dressed to Rule: Royal and Court Costume from Louis XIV to Elizabeth II. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Society of Literature, the Institute of Historical Research and the Royal Asiatic Society, and he is President of the Conseil Scientifique at the Centre de Recherche du Chateau de Versailles and a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.